Alone Again, Naturally : Civil Rights: The Rev. Ralph Abernathy has been cast anew as an embattled outsider, now for detailing in his autobiography the extramarital sex life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By LEE MAY

Oct. 16, 1989 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ATLANTA — The Rev. Ralph David Abernathy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were inseparable. In dusty little towns and crowded big cities, they prayed together, marched together, went to jail together, suffered the brutality of racist bombings and beatings together.

And when their tireless efforts to forge justice out of injustice paid off, they celebrated together, enjoying sumptuous soul food and flying high on the applause and amens of appreciative audiences responding to the civil rights movement’s electricity and to King’s incomparable rhetoric.

But now, Abernathy, always acknowledged as King’s best friend, his alter ego and right-hand man, is embroiled in another battle: He is trying to prove that he remains true to the slain leader’s memory.

He has been forced to do so because his new autobiographical account of the turbulent civil rights era, “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down,” includes details of King’s sexual exploits in Memphis the night before he was murdered on April 4, 1968. The book provides a more vivid account of King’s extramarital sex life than those previously published, an account made all the more striking--and controversial--because the two men were so close.

Abernathy writes that King spent part of his last night with two women and that in the course of an argument with a third woman who was jealous, “knocked her across the bed.”

The details, though a small part of the book, have enraged civil rights activists nationwide, bringing wrath upon Abernathy, overshadowing other parts of his 620-page autobiography and, yet again, casting him in the role of the outsider.

Abernathy’s new-found attention weighed heavily on him during a two-hour interview Saturday, but at the same time it seemed to energize him as he talked in his study at West Hunter Baptist Church, for which he has been the pastor for 28 years. The green-walled room is filled with years of pictures and memorabilia from civil rights wars, his desk overrun with papers and a wooden nameplate that says “Dr. A.”

Dapper in blue blazer, gray pants, gray shirt and a red, gray and blue striped tie, the 63-year-old minister seemed to be riding a crest that comes with a book that draws massive attention.

But it also was clear that the wave of anger from his one-time allies was on his mind.

He said that 70% of the people who have written him “commend me for the job that I have done in writing a true and honest book,” but “30% of the mail has condemned me. They say mean and nasty things. One called me Ralph David Abernasty.” Some say that “during my surgery (after one of two strokes in the 1980s) they must have taken all of my brain out.”

Last week, civil rights activists, including Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP; Jesse Jackson; Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, and the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, signed a statement charging that Abernathy’s book is “riddled with gross inaccuracies.”

The group expressed “anguish” for Abernathy’s “two massive strokes that resulted in major brain surgery,” a not-thinly veiled suggestion that Abernathy was mentally unstable.

In a separate statement, Hooks accused Abernathy of succumbing to “the temptation to desecrate the memory of” King, adding: “It is possible that this unfortunate episode was brought on by the two massive strokes suffered by Dr. Abernathy in recent years. . . .”

Angrily recalling such talk and denying the strokes were “massive,” Abernathy, in the interview, suddenly sprang from his burgundy chair, turned from side to side, raised his arms, exposing red suspenders, and asked: “Do you see me standing up? Can I use all . . . of my body?”

He conceded that “it hurts to know that they are now trying to destroy me. But I say, read the book, the whole book. I want them to read it.”

Abernathy said that he discussed King’s sex life to “set the record straight,” to share not only the what but the why of King’s sexual activities, to show that heroes are mortals and that mortals--even downtrodden ones--can become heroes.

“I think I can make some attempt to render justice to the dead without causing too much unnecessary pain to the living,” he wrote.

In the interview, he said of King: “He is a human being, just like all of us, but he rose to the level of being a hero, and when you become a hero in the midst of this army like we were and staying in jail three and four weeks, not sleeping with your wife, you don’t have to pursue women. Women pursue you.”

That so many misunderstand his motives is, in Abernathy’s view, just one more instance of his being treated unfairly.

“I have been left out for a long time,” he said in his familiar deep drawl.

His voice heavy and slow, he added: “I’m sorry if I hurt anybody or offended anybody. I have not taken Martin out of history, no more than they can take me out of history. . . . I just should have written more, and I may write more. I may write the second volume . . . and write how I have been left out. In so many instances, there has been an attempt to rewrite history.

“And many times on photographs, Martin and I were marching together, hand in hand, they cropped the photographs and left me out.”

He also complained that civil rights activists have slighted his wife, Juanita, for example, sending invitations addressed only to him. “She’s totally left out,” he said, sadly.

In his book, which graphically recalls the marches, demonstrations, Ku Klux Klan bombings--including his own home and church in Montgomery--and brutal police attacks that characterized the long, bloody civil rights struggle, Abernathy also deals with his ouster as president of SCLC, a post he assumed after King’s murder.

An SCLC delegation, including Lowery, set a meeting with him in 1976, when, Abernathy writes, one of the men told him, “you’ve outlived your usefulness.”

“What hurt was my growing awareness that I had failed the SCLC, an organization that I helped to found,” Abernathy writes, adding he was “overcome with shame and dread, shame because my best was not good enough, dread because I knew that I would have to resign and that no explanation could fully hide the reason.”

He did resign, running unsuccessfully for a Georgia congressional seat.

Abernathy, who rushed to cradle King, wrapping a towel around his bleeding head as he lay mortally wounded on the balcony of a Memphis motel, was ignored in 1986 by organizers of a weeklong celebration of King’s birthday. Instead, the King Center, headed by Coretta Scott King, widow of the murdered leader, asked Abernathy to go to Alaska to speak at events there.

Nevertheless, Abernathy insists that he is not closing the door on his erstwhile colleagues in the civil rights movement.

Asked if the split between him and the angered activists might ever be mended, Abernathy replied: “I will always be open to receive my friends. I will not force myself on them.”

As for Coretta King, Abernathy called her “my sister,” saying: “I love her dearly.” She did not sign the statement last week, but her spokesman said she would comment on the book later.

Why did Abernathy write the book?

Striking a thoughtful pose, his hands folded and resting on his desk, he said he wrote it because “I want to show that no matter how poor you are, you don’t have to turn to dope. And no matter how outraged you are . . . you can be somebody.”

His book, in a chapter entitled “Little David,” tells of his childhood in Alabama, an upbringing marked by the good example of his parents’ hard work and industry. During the Depression, he writes, his family grew food and bartered for what they could not grow. “Consequently, we never wanted for any of life’s necessities,” he writes. “Everything I learned about the Great Depression was from a college textbook.”

His dedication to the work ethic--and the belief that too many of his colleagues in the civil rights movement did not share his conviction--contributed to the chasm between Abernathy and mainstream rights leaders.

His position as outsider was solidified in 1980 when Abernathy, joined by fellow outsider-activist Hosea Williams, came out in support of Ronald Reagan for President. It was a bitter experience, and Abernathy returned to the Democratic fold, supporting Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988.

In the interview, Abernathy said that Reagan “set back the clock of history” on civil rights and failed to deliver on promises to create jobs for the hard-core unemployed.

Abernathy said he remains dedicated to the principle of self-help, asserting that rights activists have concentrated too much on politics and not enough on economic issues--”a terrible mistake,” he called it, frowning.

“Not only are a voteless people a hopeless people. A non-producing people are hopeless also,” he said.

“We are just consumers, headed to the supermarket,” he declared, contrasting such behavior with the egg producing and garden growing of his youth.

In chapter after chapter, named for civil rights battlegrounds--Atlanta, Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, Memphis--Abernathy tells stories fondly of his alliance with King, their fear, anger, the outrages they suffered, their good times, the humor and charm of King, who was, compared to Abernathy, from a privileged class.

Their differences--King the elegant orator, Abernathy the slow-talking workman and loyal compadre--always were apparent and accepted. “I could never be Martin Luther King, but it was just as difficult for him to be me,” Abernathy said.

Abernathy in 1955 was an organizer of the Montgomery Improvement Assn., which guided the successful bus boycott there, the catalyst for the nonviolent protest movement. After the boycott, he left Montgomery to join King at the SCLC in Atlanta.

But none of that seems likely to get as much attention as the details of King’s extramarital sex life, including the revelation that King did not sleep with white women.

Abernathy’s predicament is fraught with irony. Abernathy, the loyal lieutenant who so often was overshadowed by King (once Abernathy’s date stood him up for King, he writes), is once again cast into the background--by his own account of King.

Moreover, his book has focused attention on Abernathy’s own alleged sexual indiscretions, reported in other books but not addressed in detail in his own. In the interview Abernathy freely acknowledged that he has “often lusted . . . outside my heart. I am not going to say I have been a saint. I have not been a perfect man. None is perfect but the Father, which is in heaven.”

He did deny one published account about an outraged husband threatening him because of his affair with the man’s wife. “I never went with his bride,” Abernathy said. “I never dated his bride.”

Women, he said, “didn’t desire me nearly as much as they did the hero, the leader, the spokesman for the movement.”

Time after time, when discussing the few pages about King’s last night, Abernathy appeared surprised that so much is made of it, perhaps because in recent years, readers have been treated to juicy accounts of numerous prominent Americans’ sexual liaisons--those, for example, of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Thomas Jefferson. Their gleam hardly seems tarnished.

But Abernathy’s sin, perhaps, was writing from too close a view--he is a black insider, a friend, airing the same laundry used for years by white enemies like J. Edgar Hoover, the vindictive FBI director, and Sen. Jesse Helms, the anti-King senator who many fear will use Abernathy’s book to attack King yet again.

Or maybe black heroes--because America acknowledges so few--are thought to be more fragile than white ones.

In any case, Abernathy believes he wrote his book the right way, asserting: “I believe if (King) were here today, he would say, ‘Ralph, write that story, if it will stop the murders that are taking place in the black community, if it will stop black people from smoking crack and using dope and destroying themselves.’ That is what the movement should be all about, not getting on camera and appearing on TV. . . .”

Abernathy spoke proudly of the homeless shelter for some 300 people at his huge brick church, located in Atlanta’s historic West End, an effort he cites as a model for civil rights activism but one some of the church neighbors criticize.

Taking the long view, Abernathy said he hopes his book will be “a lasting tribute to the authentic history of America and the civil rights movement.”

So far, though, the book has wrought more fury than enlightenment. Can the battered preacher who stood up to uncounted white racists continue to take the heat from black critics?

“Well, I may be completely ostracized by these people,” he said, “but I will rise again. I’m going to be all right because thousands and thousands and millions of people across this nation love me and appreciate the fact that I carried on Martin Luther King’s dreams.”

Researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.